In religion I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order. It associates with Heaven an idea of equality that keeps rich men from being massacred by the poor…Society is impossible without inequality, inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.

without good manners, human society would be intolerable and impossible

Human society cannot carry on without some creed, because a code and a character are the
product of a creed.

Solitude is impractical and yet society is fatal.

Liberty does not exist in the absence of morality.

A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty.

Property and society are completely irreconcilable with one another. It is as impossible to associate two proprietors as to join two magnets by their opposite poles. Either society must perish, or it must destroy property.

There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.

Nulle société ne peut exister sans échange, nul échange sans mesure commune, et nulle mesure commune sans égalité.

The fact that we are constantly choosing between different values without a social code prescribing how we ought to choose does not surprise us and does not suggest to us that our moral code is incomplete. In our society there is neither occasion nor reason why people should develop common views about what should be done in such situations. But where all the means to be used are the property of society and are to be used in the name of society according to a unitary plan, a “social” view about what ought to be done must guide all decisions. In such a world we should soon find that our moral code is full of gaps.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.

Prayer and comfortable living are incompatible.

If state, party and social policy will not be based on morality, then mankind has no future to speak of.

In the first place, it would efface from everybody’s
conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a cer-
tain degree, but the safest way to make them respected is
to make them respectable. When law and morality are in
contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in
the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of
losing his respect for the law — two evils of equal magni-
tude, between which it would be difficult to choose.